U.S. EPA recently released its 2013 enforcement report, which highlights the $5.6B in fines, restitution and court-ordered environmental projects that U.S. EPA obtained in civil and criminal enforcement proceedings in 2013 (as compared to $200M in 2012). It should be noted, however, that the Deepwater Horizon events themselves accounted for $5B of the $5.6B collected by U.S. EPA in 2013. Two additional matters accounted for $450M of the remaining $600M collected by U.S. EPA.

U.S. EPA acknowledged that it pursued 20% fewer enforcement cases in 2013 although the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon prosecution provides a partial explanation for this enforcement decrease. However, this enforcement decline is consistent with U.S. EPA's draft Strategic Plan for 2014-2018 which was the subject of an earlier blog post . As discussed in the earlier post, instead of focusing on the numeric volume of enforcement cases, U.S. EPA's strategic plan proposes to target larger and more complex environmental violations and violaters.